1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information recording/reproducing apparatus, and more particularly to an audio apparatus for automatically reproducing or playing back music and automatically recording the music reproduced in a storage device when an information recording medium storing music information recorded is loaded into a reproducing device for reproducing it.
2. Description of the Related Art
An audio apparatus such as an in-vehicle audio apparatus has a storage-medium reproducing device such as a CD player, so that a user can enjoy the music reproduced or played back by the reproducing device. The audio apparatus also has a hard disk (hereinafter referred to as HD) with a large capacity of e.g. several tens G (giga) bytes and a hard disk drive (HDD) for driving HD, so that the user can enjoy any selected music program reproduced by a music reproducing system from the HD in which a large number of recording media such as CDs are copied (see JP-A-2000-207845).
According to such an audio apparatus, if contents of a large number of recording media, e.g. CD have been previously recorded in a built-in HD, a preferred piece of music read from among programmed pieces of music contained in a large number of CDs can be enjoyed with no loading/unloading thereof. Particularly, from the viewpoint of safety driving, this is preferred in an in-vehicle audio apparatus, which is mostly operated during driving because copying in HD makes it unnecessary to load/unload a recording medium such as CD.
In this way, in the in-vehicle apparatus, contents of a large number of CDs are often used in a form recorded in a storage device such as HD. Some audio apparatus, therefore, have been also proposed in which the reproducing/recording of CD is automatically started when CD is loaded into a reproducing device.